Article - So You Took Ayahuasca? The Therapist Will See You Now

I was recently featured in a Wall Street Journal article on ayahuasca integration counseling.

Podcast - A Deep Dive Into Ayahuasca

I was on the Multiple Truths Podcast to discuss the use of Ayahuasca for healing and transformation.

Podcast - Cultivating Pride Ayahuasca Retreats

I was on the Queer Travel Chat podcast to discuss the Cultivating Pride Ayahuasca retreats for gay and queer men.

Ayahuasca, Meditation and Psychotherapy

Ayahuasca, Meditation and Psychotherapy

I have spent the better part of the last 20 years exploring different approaches to psycho-emotional healing and personal transformation. While I initially trained as a psychotherapist with a mental health orientation, I eventually came to see the need for deeper and more holistic approaches that address the body, mind, heart and spirit.

That eventually led me to travel around the world to study and experience a wide variety of different approaches to healing from spiritual orientations to body work and everything in between. And while I have found some incredible tools and beautiful healing art traditions, I have not found one single approach that covers all the bases for every person.

However, I have found that combining ayahuasca plant medicine, depth-oriented psychotherapy, and formal meditation practice offers a powerful recipe for personal healing and growth in a synergistic way that effectively addresses the mind, the body, the heart and the spirit.

As someone who has experienced the benefits of each of these approaches as a student, a client, and a participant and as someone that is also a working professional doing healing work with each of these modalities, I have come to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and how a combination of all of them can work synergistically to support the self through healing, growth, and transformation.

This article covers the strengths and weaknesses of each modality.

Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca plant medicine, guided in a shamanic framework for the explicit purpose of healing, is undoubtedly the most powerful healing modality I have ever encountered. It is an incredibly versatile healing agent and spiritual teacher that offers an accelerated approach to healing and growth.

I was so impressed with my first experiences with ayahuasca that a 1-time ayahuasca retreat turned into a 3 year odyssey living full time in the Peruvian Amazon, studying Ayahuasca practices, training as an ayahuasquero under the tutelage of an Amazonian medicine man, and facilitating ayahuasca and plant medicine retreats at a large retreat center.

I am speaking however of a very particular kind of work with ayahuasca: ayahuasca plant medicine shamanism. Plant medicine shamanism means that the plant is being used with a specific healing intention and framework that guides all the ways in which the ceremony is facilitated. The central feature of this is that not only is the physical substance of the plant being consumed but the spirit of the plant is being engaged and enlisted in the healing as well.

This contrasts to some “western” ayahuasca circles that have many different ways of working with ayahuasca, not all of them based in medicine nor based in an earned relationship with the plant spirit. For example, drinking ayahuasca with one of the ayahuasca churches such as Santo Daime is not necessarily part of an intentional healing framework. Santo Daime has a religious framework and the experience is primarily guided as a religious experience. There are specific religious beliefs that one is expected to adopt, specific religious doctrines that are followed and the intention is to use ayahuasca as a sacrament for a religious experience. And while this approach certainly does yield healing benefits, it is very different than a healing-oriented approach steeped in the framework of plant spirit medicine. For this you need to work with an experienced ayahuasquero who has through their training with the plant spirits earned and learned the ability to invoke the plant medicine spirits to do healing work.

Strengths

Ayahuasca is able to quickly surface shadow material. Whereas a psychotherapist may have to patiently wait for hidden or unconscious beliefs, feelings and experiences to arise organically, ayahuasca can bring them to the conscious mind within 1 ceremony. This is very powerful as being aware of our shadow side is the necessary first step to addressing it. It is very hard to heal or change something that you can’t even see. Ayahuasca helps you to see. Whereas psychotherapy is like entering a client’s world with a small flashlight and a hand mirror, ayahuasca is more like having someone with a 50,000 watt spotlight and a giant full length mirror shining light inside you. It’s not always pleasant or pretty, but it shows you what needs attention.

Another major strength of ayahuasca is that it can help to remove or release stored traumas, old emotions, negative past experiences, even old beliefs and understandings of the world. Ayahuasca is a world-class purgative, in both the literal and figurative sense. I have not found anything else in the world that can help someone to instantly release things on an emotional, psychological, physical and even spiritual level. A single ayahuasca ceremony can help someone release stored hurt/pain that they’ve been carrying since childhood.

Ayahuasca also offers the prospect of deep meaningful spiritual experiences. In a materialistic culture that is hyper-focused on the individual and oriented towards egoistic pursuits, having a transcendent experience and connecting to something beyond the self is deeply healing and powerful. I have seen many atheists that after drinking ayahuasca come to believe in God or a conscious universe or have an experiential understanding of a spiritual dimension to life. These experiences are always life-changing and deeply meaningful.

Another benefit of ayahuasca is that it can engender a heart-opening experience where one can experience pure universal love (i.e. an experience of love that transcends the personal, the romantic, and the familial). Heart-opening experiences are always profound and life-changing. Many people have never really experienced pure love before and having an experience of their heart opening to the point that they feel singularly connected to every single thing and person around them is deeply healing.

Finally, ayahuasca offers the potential for wisdom, guidance, and insight around the self’s struggles, the nature of reality and spirituality. You can take a problem that you are dealing with in your life and receive guidance on it’s nature and how to deal with it. This wisdom and guidance can come as a download from the plants, whose consciousness one interacts with by ingesting them, but it can also come from deeper more wise parts of the self, sometimes called the higher self.

Weaknesses

However, over the years of working with this incredible plant medicine and guiding others in working with it, I have seen that Ayahuasca is not a panacea and doesn’t magically heal everything. It also has some very specific pitfalls that require working with it thoughtfully.

One common challenge with ayahuasca is that the communication isn’t always clear. Spirits often communicate via metaphor, imagery and symbol. People may be left with visions they don’t understand or that confuse them. It takes time, experience and often experienced guidance to understand how to make sense of some experiences. And some experiences cannot be understood at the level of the conscious mind. This can really confuse people and if one becomes attached to these visions or images, it can create problems within the self. This is doubly so if one draws definitive conclusions to visions and acts from them.

For example, one may see an ex-lover appear in a vision and make assumptions or interpretations that this means you were meant to be with that person (i.e. they are my soul mate, twin-flame, etc.). This kind of interpretation is wrapped in one’s own biases, desires, and secret wishes and it is a classic way in which the ego can insert itself into the experience.

This leads to another major pitfall with ayahuasca is that it can lead to delusion. Again the ego’s hold on the mind can lead it to distort things to serve it’s own ends. And this holds especially true for people who drink a lot of ayahuasca over many years without working on their self or their ego with other tools. The achilles heel here is that the experience is by definition in your mind (as well as your body and your emotional body) so it can be subject to the same biases, distortions, and self-serving delusions that we experience in our relationship to ordinary experiences and reality. If one continues to consume ayahuasca or even other psychedelics on a regular basis without addressing the ego, the medicine can actually strengthen the ego or the self in ways that are unhelpful (i.e. by strengthening the unseen and shadow aspects of the self).

This is why working with an outside agent that provides accountability is so helpful.

Another pitfall is that ayahuasca, and really all other plant medicines and psychedelics can be used in an escapist way. People can use it to avoid dealing with their issues just as much as they can use it to address them. It comes down to the intention one brings to the medicine. If someone is very guarded and very defended, one can employ these substances in service of the defenses. This is similar to what is called spiritual bypass. It’s what you get when you use ayahuasca to avoid versus face something.

Psychotherapy

Strengths

Psychotherapy is obviously the most well-known tool in the western world for addressing emotional pain, psychological issues, and behavioral problems. In psychotherapy you are working with another person with whom you are sharing your inner world and discussing your pain points with. The therapist is offering an “objective” external perspective on them. I say objective in quotes because obviously no one is objective and psychotherapists are filled with the same biases that all humans are. But you are working with an outside party who has training and understanding on the nature of emotional and psychological pain and how to improve it.

This means that you have an experienced person to guide you through the process of healing. This can be very helpful because the healing journey can be very daunting and confusing to someone who is new to it. Since the healing journey is universal and archetypal, someone who has been through it and has guided many others through it can be an excellent guide.

A key benefit of working with a psychotherapist, is that they offer accountability. They can point out when you are deviating off the course and when you are in avoidance. They can show you when the shadow side of your ego is operating and sabotaging things in ways that are very hard for someone to do for oneself. This kind of accountability is priceless. Because the egoic self is always operating it has a tendency to slip in to all our activities, even our healing pursuits, and a good psychotherapist will notice and point out when this is happening.

Weaknesses

One of the fundamental weaknesses of psychotherapy is the fact that you are working with a human that is limited to a human understanding of how things work. Compared to the wisdom of medicinal plants, it pales in comparison. Most traditional psychotherapists, for example, have no understanding of how spirits work, how energy works, how the body, mind, emotion and spirit are all aspects of one energy and that changes or disturbances in one domain can affect all the others.

Psychotherapy also primarily operates on the mental level and is engaged-in through conscious dialog between two people. This is very limiting as the mental level of understanding is a very narrow slice of the human experience. You can do 10 years of psychotherapy and still not address issues that are physically stored in your body. This is why some people who experience ayahuasca excitedly say “it’s like 10 years of therapy in one night!” Well, no, not really. It’s not that it’s equivalent to 10 years of psychotherapy, it’s that ayahuasca is working in a different way that accesses things that 100 years of psychotherapy will never touch. While there are modalities of psychotherapy that focus on emotional or even physical and somatic levels of experience, the overall framework is still fundamentally a mental process of dialogue between two people. You can only go so far working with the ordinary conscious mind and ordinary mental processes. So while psychotherapy can be very powerful and healing it has its limitations.

Another weakness of psychotherapy is that it can lead to dependence. This occurs when someone is seeing a psychotherapist continuously over a very long period of time (e.g. weekly therapy for many many years) and the therapist ends-up becoming the primary support for the client. There are certain cases where this can be helpful but more often than not this does not serve the client. It suggests that the therapist and the client are not addressing something vital that is keeping the client from growing past the constant need for psychotherapy.

In addition, the emotional closeness formed over years by working in this intimate way with another person can lead the therapy itself to become a substitute to “real” intimacy and serve to keep the client from actually learning to get their intimacy needs met with others in their life. The therapist sometimes can become the central authority on the client’s healing in which case the client in some form gives up their power or self-determination to the therapist, which undermines the client. It is yourhealing journey, your therapist is only a guide. They are not supposed to be the main character! You are the main character and there may be many guides over the course of your life.

Finally, psychotherapy can lead to a false sense of healing. I see this a lot. People experience an intellectual understanding of their issues though work with a psychotherapist but it does not penetrate any deeper than that. The underlying emotional pain is still there or the dysfunctional patterns are basically still in tact. The mental understanding then becomes a tool of the ego to avoid really dealing with the pain or dysfunctional pattern underneath. So people end-up leaving psychotherapy thinking they’ve “addresses all their issues” when really they’ve only addressed the very top layer of them. Eventually suffering in their life will lead them to return to some kind of deeper work but in the meantime the intellectual understanding becomes another defense structure in service of keeping the status quo.

Meditation

Meditation as a practice is a very powerful tool for both healing and spiritual awakening or opening. It offers something that other modalities don’t, namely a technique that one can practice daily by oneself without the need for any outside agent.

Strengths

One of the beauties of meditation is that it is a very personal practice that you can easily integrate into your every day life. Unlike psychotherapy or ayahuasca, it does not require anyone else’s assistance and it costs nothing. It can be easily integrated into every day life as it takes as little as 10 minutes of sitting quietly and requires no special knowledge, elaborate setups, or major time commitments. It also is a practice that builds on itself and yields increasing benefits over time.

Meditation offers a tool that allows you to learn about the nature of your mind and how your mind works through your own direct observation and experience.

It also helps people to be more aware of their reactions and reactivity in every day life, an important tool for cultivating a more balanced life and a powerful aid in identifying shadow elements of self that come online in day to day life. I find that clients that I work with who meditate regularly have a much better ability to observe themselves and see what is going on inside of them than those who don’t.

Most importantly, it offers a direct experience of pure consciousness or awareness without filtering by the mind. It can take a lot of practice to get to a point where one can experience this but it is powerful and life changing to experience reality without the thinking mind getting involved and to see first hand that consciousness and thinking are different things. Furthermore, when practiced regularly, it offers a regular experience of the deep stillness that occurs when the mind is quiet, and offers the spiritual experience of pure being or awareness that is beyond the self.

Weaknesses

As helpful as meditation can be, it has some weaknesses as well. Meditation does not necessarily address emotional healing or negative self-patterns. One can meditate daily their entire lives and never deal with repressed emotional material or face traumatic childhood experiences that are the cause of present day suffering and dysfunction. In the absence of any more directed healing work it can also serve for some people as an escape from human pain or as a tool to avoid dealing with one’s own shadow side (eg spiritual bypass).

Another issue is that meditation is often part of a religious tradition that can bring its own challenges. People end-up swallowing wholesale the beliefs and stories of the tradition in which the meditation is based. With meditation this is typically some flavor of buddhism or hinduism. When one adopts religious concept as a belief and identifies with them it can lead to religious fundamentalism, a rigid adherence to dogma, and the erroneous belief that this is the “the only true path.” That is a spiritual falsehood that ends-up causing it’s own harms and adds to one’s pile of issues that need to be sorted through eventually.

For example, I have seen that the entire complex of enlightenment-oriented dogma and doctrine can really mislead people. The mental concept of what enlightenment is becomes a focus or even obsession that actually ends-up leading people away from their truth and true self. People pursue enlightenment with the similar attitude that some Christians pursue salvation. Inherent in this construct is the belief that one is deficient and needs something “out there” to save them, the “out there” being in this case enlightenment and/or an enlightened teacher. True salvation comes from within not from anywhere else; this has been a spiritual truth since the beginning of time.

Furthermore, it leads them to idealize the supposedly “awakened” teacher in unhealthy ways that ends-up undermining one’s own personal power and creating the same dependency dynamics that can be found in psychotherapy. Just as a psychotherapist can become the main character in one’s healing journey, with religiously-oriented meditation the guru or awakened teacher can become the main character and the central focus of the person’s life. This, in my opinion, is a risky proposition that flies in the face of the basic spiritual truths that underly the teachings in the first place.

Podcast - Healing with Plant Medicine

I spoke with Matt Landsiedel of the Gay Men Going Deeper podcast about how to use plant medicines for healing and my experience facilitating ayahuasca retreats for gay and queer men at Reunion Costa Rica.

Podcast - Best Ayahuasca Integration Practices

I was recently on the Ayahuasca Avatars podcast discussing best practices for integrating ayahuasca ceremony experiences.

Comprehensive Meta-study Shows Once Again Exercise Is More Effective than Medication For Depression

A new meta-study that examined 97 previous research studies on the effects of exercise on mental health, found that exercise was effective at reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety across a variety of mental health conditions (1).

And more importantly, vigorous exercise was as good or better than psychiatric medication and psychotherapy for reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety(1).

A tremendous amount of research has been conducted examining the neurophysiological effects of exercise and there is no doubt that is has positive impacts on stress-response, neurogenesis, systemic inflammation, attention, and mood (2). In fact previous studies have already shown that exercise can be better than anti-depressant medication for treating depression (3, 4, 5).

This meta-study found that while all types of exercise are beneficial, strength training had the largest effect on depression and yoga had the biggest effect on anxiety. It also showed that higher intensity exercise has bigger effect sizes on depression than lower intensity activity. This is likely due to the fact that high-intensity and vigorous exercise stimulate neurobiological and hormonal activity that aren't activated by light activity.

The good news is you don't have to exercise for very long to get these benefits. 30-45 minutes seems to be a sweet-spot but it's possible that even shorter-duration high intensity exercise can deliver similar results.

So while any physical activity, can help, if you're looking to recover from depression, then 30 minutes of intense exercise 3-4 times a week is one of your best options. And if you're trying to manage your anxiety, starting a regular yoga practice is a good place to start.

Sources

(1) Ben Singh, Olds, T., Curtis, R., Dumuid, D., Virgara, R., Watson, A., et al. (2023). Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: an overview of systematic reviews. British Journal of Sports Medicine.

(2) Basso, J. C., & Suzuki, W. A. (2017). The Effects of Acute Exercise on Mood, Cognition, Neurophysiology, and Neurochemical Pathways: A Review. Brain Plasticity, 2(2), 127–152.

(3) Hume, W. (2001). Exercise was more effective in the long term than sertraline or exercise plus sertraline for major depression in older adults. Evidence-Based Mental Health, 4(4), 105–105.

(4) Knapen, J., Vancampfort, D., Schoubs, B., Probst, M., Sienaert, P., Haake, P., et al. (2009). Exercise for the Treatment of Depression. The Open Complementary Medicine Journal, 1(1).

(5) Dinas, P. C., Koutedakis, Y., & Flouris, A. D. (2010). Effects of exercise and physical activity on depression. Irish Journal of Medical Science, 180(2), 319–325.

Podcast Interview - Plants Saved My Life

I was recently interviewed on the Plants Saved My Life podcast, where I talked about the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic plant medicines and how I integrate the lessons from plant medicines into my therapy practice.

How To Integrate An Ayahuasca Ceremony

Start With Your intentions

Integrating an experience with ayahuasca starts way before the ceremony itself. It starts when you first decide you want to work with ayahuasca. The motivation that leads you to make that decision is the first step of integration. Some people may even feel that they have started to connect with the medicine as soon as they make that decision. It’s as if ayahuasca is already starting to work or communicate with them. This can happen in dreams, in meditations or on every day life.

The first question I ask a client seeing me to integrate an ayahuasca ceremony is why did you choose to participate in the first place. What led you to make that decision? What were your hopes for the experience? What were your intentions for ceremony?

This is the foundation of working with ayahuasca and these reasons and intentions for participating in the first place provide a framework for understanding both what happened in ceremony and what to do about it afterwards.

Keep A Ceremony Journal

I recommend anyone doing serious intentional or healing work ayahuasca keep a physical journal that they use during preparation, throughout the ceremony or retreat, and during integration. Having a written record of your journey from beginning to end can provide valuable insight on what happened and what it means for your life. It’s also something you can look back on and refer to later to see what has changed and what still needs attention.

Reflect On The Experience

Reflecting on the experience is a necessary part of integration. This is where having a ceremony journal is helpful. Reconnecting to the ceremonies after the fact can help you to make sense of what happened, make the connections between the ceremony and various aspects of your life, and identify what the implications are for the experience. What changes need to be made in your life to reflect the insights, the releases, the healings and the new life perspective that you have? Consider how your intentions may relate to what happened in the ceremonies. What take-aways are there for your life? If you had an important intention for working with ayahuasca and you received a lot of insights around it, what do those insights mean for you going forward? It’s important to sit with these questions and deeply reflect on the experience. There is way too much happening in an ayahuasca ceremony to track it all. You need intentional time afterwards to make sense of it.

Process The Experience

Talking about what happened to trusted others can really help in processing and making sense of the experience. We are very verbal creatures. Narrating what happened actually helps us to make sense of things. This is why many ceremony circles and ayahuasca retreats offer sharing or integration circles. These are spaces dedicated for verbalizing and sharing with others what happened. It’s an important part of integrating an experience and you may find that just by talking about what happened, your understanding of it gets clearer and the insights you had are strengthened and reinforced. Ayahuasca experiences are often so powerful and intense that we can’t verbalize or narrate them in the moment. That kind of conscious understanding only happens afterwards and talking about it is an important piece.

You can talk about it with a loved one who is able to listen without judgement and who you feel safe with. You can also process the experience with a professional counselor who specializes in ayahuasca integration, or with a peer support group such as a psychedelic integration circle. I’ve provided links to some helpful integration resources at the end of this article.

Put It Into Practice

Make a behavioral change in your life that reflects, honors or strengthens a key insight or learning that you experienced in ceremony. One of the best ways to do this is to ask “how can I put this into practice in my life?” This is something you can directly ask ayahuasca during the ceremony or something you can meditate on afterwards. Examples are starting a new daily spiritual practice, cutting out a bad habit or addictive behavior, making a commitment to communicate more honestly, or making changes to diet or exercise routines. It can also include bigger life changes relating to relationships, career, or lifestyle but big changes require a lot more time, space and reflection. It is rarely a good idea to make a major life change immediately after ceremony.

In my experience, those who make thoughtful tangible changes in their life have the most transformative experiences with ayahuasca over time. And when they return for future ceremonies they are ready to tackle something new rather than retreading the same material.

Address Unfinished Business

Sometimes ceremonies leave us with new revelations, unanswered questions or an incomplete process. Perhaps the medicine made it clear that there is personal healing and growth work needed to address your intentions. Or maybe it brought to light an unresolved trauma or some other shadow work that hasn’t fully been addressed. In these cases, integration involves continued personal work on the issue. This can be done with a therapist or coach or spiritual guide or it can be done on one’s own. But the bottom line is that there is personal healing or growth work that needs to be attended to and integration in these cases means doing that work. This kind of inner work takes time, especially if personal healing work is new to you.

Some people feel a strong urge to do another ceremony right away to address the unfinished business with ayahuasca. But in my experience, you will be best served by working with it on your own before deciding to return to ceremony to address it further. The medicine will meet you where you are. When you’ve worked on it and have done your part, it will take you further. But if you are given clear insight about personal healing work and you don’t act on or address it you may very well retread the same issues next time you sit with ayahuasca and get the same message albeit in a bit sterner a fashion.

Continue The Work

Just because you’re done with ceremony doesn’t mean you can’t continue to work with ayahuasca. To the contrary, you can call on ayahuasca to help with your intentions or other issues in your life at any time. By attending even one ayahuasca ceremony you have established a relationship with the medicine as a teacher, healer and guide. Once you’ve made that connection, you can continue to work with the spirit of ayahuasca regardless of whether you ever sit in another ceremony again. Having an established spiritual practice really helps with this. If you have a meditation practice, a shamanic journey practice, a breathwork practice, or a dreamwork practice, you can use them as ways to connect with ayahuasca and seek its guidance and help. Just like with ceremony, have a question or intention for the medicine before starting your meditation or your journey or before going to sleep and just be open to whatever comes up. Answers can come in the most surprising ways. Use a journal to track your process just as with ceremony.

Integration Resources

This approach to integration is based on my many years of working with ayahuasca as a participant, a shamanic apprentice, a guide and a facilitator as well as my experience as an integration therapist guiding people through their ayahuasca journeys.

Below are some resources that may be helpful for integration:

• Article: How to work more deeply with plant medicine

• Book: Ayahuasca Soul Medicine of the Jungle

• Spiritual Workshops: Center for the Sacred Stream

• Directory of Psychedelic Support Counselors: https://psychedelic.support

• Psychedelic Peer Support Line: Fireside Project

Podcast Interview - New Paradigm Healing

I was recently interviewed on the New Paradigm Healing where I answered questions about ayahuasca healing practices and it’s relationship to psychotherapy.